The lab has been pre-approved for API 197 Internship Credit by the Academic Internship Program at UCSD. If your major or minor is not Linguistics, you can now still earn academic credit working with us!
New Commentary: Formalist Modeling and Psychological Reality
How do theoretical constructs correspond to cognitive reality? How do human learners’ behavior and formalist modeling connect?
Go here to find out what we think about it!
Wittenberg, Eva & Ray Jackendoff (2018). Formalist Modeling and Psychological Reality. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 8:6, 787-791.
New Review Paper: Argument Structure Alternations and Event Construal
Hot off the presses! Eva has a new paper in Psychology of Learning and Motivation about the relationship between grammar and event construal.
Abstract:
The most fundamental function of language is to enable people to share mental models of their worlds. For a comprehender, the given mental model she is building will be shaped by the lexical items, and also by the syntactic structures, that a speaker is using. In this chapter, I review literature that unearths the mental models formed by comprehenders, based on the grammatical structure they encounter, as mutually informative for both linguistic theory and event and object cognition. This chapter uses the well-studied case of light verb constructions and reviews data from a range of experimental studies that investigated how linguistic structure shapes core aspects of mental models: the conceptualization of event participants, and temporal structure in events.
Psycholinguistics of dialect in the news
Today there was a nice (German 😉) article about one of our new projects in the regional news of Upper Franconia. Together with our collaborator Andreas Trotzke, we are launching a series of studies that investigate the grammatical system of a regional rural dialect in Bavaria, and a local newspaper interviewed Eva.
New paper in “Cognitive Science”!
Review on a new book on language evolution
LCL at CGG 28
The UCSD Language Comprehension Lab will be represented at the 28th Colloquium on Generative Grammar 2018 in Tarragona, Spain, together with a long list of lovely co-authors, talking about priming argument structure at the Workshop “Ars-Ling: Argument Structure and Linguistic Processing”:
Bjorn Lundquist, Martin Corley, Antonella Sorace, Mai Tungseth, Eva Wittenberg and Gillian Ramchand: Adventures in Structural Priming: The Search for Effects of Argument Structure.
Eva at NerdNite San Diego
On Tuesday, March 6th, Eva gave a San Diego Nerd Nite talk on The World of Words at 32 North Brewing Co. What can we say — tip-of-the-tongue states are simply better with beer. Here is what Eva talked about:
Words are curious creatures. Ever looked for one and couldn’t find it? Where exactly did you look? Did you look for its sound or its meaning? Or did you accidentally create a Frankenword by misunderestimating how hard it is to put the parts of the words together? These are signs that you are utterly normal … but maybe it’d be good to learn a thing or two about words. We’re going to do just that.
Review of Radvansky & Zacks (2014), Event Cognition
LCL goes to SALA 2018!
The Language Comprehension Lab will give a talk and present a poster at this year’s South Asian Languages Analysis Roundtable (SALA) in Konstanz, Germany.
“Peeling oranges in Hindi: Ergative case-marking as cue in real-time event construal”
Poster by Eva Wittenberg and Ashwini Vaidya
“Frequency regulates argument sharing effects in Hindi light verb constructions”
Talk by Ashwini Vaidya and Eva Wittenberg